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Cultural Studies and Common Sense Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory/Revue canadienne de theorie politique et sociale, Vol. 5, Nos. 1-2 (Winter/ Spring, 1981) . CULTURAL STUDIES AND COMMON SENSE Alan O'Connor Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London and New York: Methuen, 1979, and John Clarke, Chas Critcher, Richard Johnson, Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, London: Hutchinson, 1979. Two recent publications from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, at the University of Birmingham, provide further evidence of the "linguistic turn" in social and cultural studies. An important part of this phenomenon is the reformulation of methodological principles in terms of members' communicative competences. In North America, for example, "contextual" folklore studies make a strong case for granting the everyday expressions of social groups their own intelligibility . I In terms of a different tradition, if Frazer's Golden Bough pours scorn on certain rites of dawn, Wittgenstein, in an obscure text that has recently been reprinted, observes that "towards morning, when the sun is about to rise, people celebrate rites of the coming of the day, but not at night, for then they simply burn lamps."2 Long after Frazer's Golden Bough, intellectual writers have been notoriously overconfident that they have understood the meaning and foolishness of the artistic communication and everyday rituals of different social groups. Cultural studies inherits, in the works of Raymond Williams, many thoughtful passages on exactly this problem. The speaking voice and the dancing body that the student of contemporary culture encounters are, Williams insists, already interpreted as part of an ordinary conversation or the everyday organization of the dance. In a passage of The Long Revolution he writes : "the emphasis that matters is that there are, essentially, no `ordinary' activities, if by `ordinary' we mean the absence of creative interpretation and effort."3 The published papers ofcultural studies are the result ofan encounter between its own organized discourse and the everyday understandings of native actions and experiences. The theme of the authenticity of everyday experience is part and parcel of the work of E .P. Thompson, who has also had a major influence on cultural studies : I would have to say that the historian has got to be listening all the time. He should not set up a book or a 183 ALAN O'CONNOR research project with a totally clear sense of exactly what he is going to be able to do. The material itself has got to speak through him. And I think that this happens.4 A major emphasis in Thompson's recent essay on "The Poverty of Theory" is the long tradition of historical activities and the accumulated skills within the discipline for "listening" to the historian's sources.s The emphasis on experience assumes what Williams calls a "knowable community,"6 in part a historical phenomenon and in part a literary convention: We have only to read a George Eliot novel to see the difficulty of the coexistence, within one form, of an analytically conscious observer of conduct with a developed analytic vocabulary, and of people represented as living and speaking in customary ways . There is a new kind of break in the texture of the novel, an evident failure of continuity between the necessary language of the novelist and the recorded language of many of the characters.? The asymmetry between the language of the observer and the oral traditions he or she inscribes is not confined to the novel. A similar distance is found in nineteenth-century social and statistical investigation. Williams contrasts the different methods of Mayhew's and Charles Booth's studies of the London poor: Mayhew is often now preferred, and he is indeed more readable and more accessible. His studies were based on direct contacts with people, telling their own stories in their own words, and though he set out to cover the whole range systematically, and often checked his findings with those he was writing about, his mode of vision belonged to an earlier world, before the scale of the problem and the sustained consideration of systematic remedies had altered social vision.$ There is no such mode of vision in Booth's work. His method of impersonal and systematic tabulation does not assume a "knowable community ." He treats the poor as objects of study, but as Williams points out, statistical and 184 CULTURAL THEORY analytic methods may be necessary in order to fully understand the complexities of a capitalist social formation, such as that of London at the turn of the century. One of the arguments for the New Left Review's systematic introduction of European "marxisms" and other bodies ofthinking, was that British marxism in the 1960's lacked the necessary "concepts and categories with which to analyze its own society."9 The extent to which British marxism has come to recognize itself by the use of certain concepts and categories (mode of production, surplus value, ideological, political and economic "instances") challenges the cultural studies tradition of valuing lived experience. The present dilemma of cultural studies is to find methods which do not simply assume a "knowable community," but which also recognize that such shared experience ought not be carelessly appropriated. There is an ambiguity, for example, in the recent approach of cultural studies to youth subcultures. The boundaries of Resistance Through Rituals are set by drawing upon marxist theoretical work that conceptualizes class and ideology in an extremely sophisticated way. This theoretical work distinguishes the approach of cultural studies to youth subcultures, from that of the sociology of leisure, or writings on the seemingly universal problems of youth. Yet there are enormous practical and social differences between this theoretical work and the everyday discourse of those whom it singles out as constituting a field for study. This dichotomy remains largely unconfronted and it is not surprising that more recent publications by members of the Birmingham Centre go in such different directions. Hebdige's book on subcultural style opts for a highly worked semiological presentation of punk style. On the other hand, the studies in working class history and theory edited by Clarke, Critcher and Johnson are informed by a theoretical orientation which makes it possible to begin to think through the relation between their textual work, and the spoken and written style of those about whom they write. H Dick Hebdige's book, Subculture: the Meaning ofStyle, is a product ofthe encounter between present-day cultural studies and youth subcultures, especially punk in Britain . It celebrates the expressive moment ofpunk before it was reduced to a fashion in music and clothes, or to "deviance" and good fun. Following Barthes in Writing Degree Zero, Hebdige interprets that moment as a zero degree of subcultural style, analogous to the white writing of the nouveau roman in France . In other words, punk is not simply another style of youth subculture, but for one intoxicating moment challenges the apparent naturalness and boundaries of any style: racial, sexual or historical. The argument is made by contrasting punk with other subcultural 185 ALAN O'CONNOR styles, those ofthe teddy boys, mods, rockers, and skinheads. The skinheads, for example, had a positive style in that they attempted to recreate in the "mob" an idealized version of traditional working class community . 10 The rolled shirt sleeves, working boots emphasized by jeans that were not quite long enough, and the overt masculine sexism, contributed to the skinheads' remembrance of a community that no longer exists as it used to be. A major theme of Hebdige's book is the mediated response of youth subcultures to the growing black presence in Britain : The proximity of the two positions - working class youth and negro - invites identification and even when this identity is repressed or openly resisted, black cultural forms (e.g. music) continue to exercise a major determining influence over the development of each subcultural style (p. 73) . Black Jamaican music, reggae, and Rastafarianism in Britain affected the emergence of punk. The whites were soon left by the wayside, however, as the black patois became more strident and the religious themes of the Rasta movement became clearer. Another important strand in Hebdige's book is the relation between punk style and the tenor of the respectable media in Britain : The punks appropriated the rhetoric of crisis which had filled the airwaves and the editorials throughout the period and translated it into tangible (and visible) terms. In the gloomy, apocalyptic ambience of the late 1970's - with massive unemployment, with the ominous violence of the Notting Hill Carnival, Grunwick, Lewisham and Ladywood - it was fitting that the punks should present themselves as `degenerates'; as signs of the highly publicized decay which perfectly represented the atrophied condition of Great Britain (p. 87). Punk ensembles subverted the media's language of crisis. Clearly Hebdige's use of the zero degree of style theme is grounded in history and actual social practices to a greater extent than Barthes's work on writing style. In Writing Degree Zero the argument extends from pre- Classical literature to Camus and beyond, without ever explicitly dealing with any one style in the detail promised by the opening lines: 186 C UL TURA L THEOR Y Hebert, the revolutionary, never began a number of his news sheet. Le Pere Duchene without introducing a sprinkling of obscenities . These improprieties had no real meaning, but they had significance. In what way? In that they expressed a whole revolutionary situation." The details of social history and culture that Hebdige includes, function within his argument solely to show that punkers are "different" . For Hebdige, the punker's only identity is that he or she is symbolically not the same as members of other social groupings.
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